Walker takes on unions again

Scott Walker’s victory over organized labor — passage of a right-to-work law in Wisconsin — is just the latest milestone in a resurgent anti-union movement marching across the industrial heartland.

Wisconsin’s right-to-work bill passed the State Assembly Friday 62-35 along party lines, and now heads to Gov. Walker, who has said he’ll sign it Monday. With this action, right to work — which allows workers not to pay dues to a union that bargains collectively on their behalf — is progressing through the states more swiftly than at any time since the 1950s. And where once such measures were confined largely to the South and West, they‘re now taking root in Midwestern union strongholds like Indiana and Michigan, which passed right-to-work laws in 2012.

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The Wisconsin bill is the byproduct of the Republican sweep of state legislatures in the past three election cycles. After last November’s elections, Republicans took control of 68 of the 98 partisan legislative chambers throughout the country, consolidating gains made in 2010 and 2012 and breaking the party’s previous record (64 chambers), set in 1920. The GOP now controls both the governorship and the legislature in 24 states; the Democrats, in only seven.

Right to work’s resurgence also reflects the labor movement’s growing unpopularity with the American worker, as union membership has fallen to 11 percent. That decline has been especially steep in the private sector, where union membership stands at 6.6 percent, down from nearly 40 percent at its peak in the early 1950s. In a vicious circle, as union representation diminishes, unions are less able to justify their dues by boosting wages, making right to work more appealing to the rank and file.

And for governors with bigger ambitions — like Walker in Wisconsin and Mike Pence in Indiana — cracking down on organized labor helps burnish their national reputation within the Republican Party.

“It is picking up steam, clearly,” said Greg Mourad, vice president of the National Right to Work Committee, a conservative nonprofit. Before Indiana went right-to-work, no state had done so in more than a decade, and only three — Louisiana, Idaho and Oklahoma — had done so since 1963. “We are definitely excited at the momentum we have been able to build for this issue,” said Mourad.

Right to work is progressing even at the local level, though its legality at any governmental level other than state or territory has yet to be established. In Kentucky, local Democrats and Republicans have passed right-to-work laws in about a dozen counties, drawing a lawsuit from the Kentucky AFL-CIO. Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner, a Republican, wants to implement “right-to-work zones” in that union-friendly state, and he issued an executive order imposing right to work on government unions that the state comptroller, a fellow Republican, refused to enforce on the grounds that it required legislative approval.

At the state level, right to work is under consideration in Missouri, West Virginia and New Mexico, though its passage in these places is less likely.

Right-to-work exemptions from payments to unions were first made available to states and territories under 1947’s Taft-Hartley Act, which rolled back labor protections in response to a postwar surge in industrial strikes. More than half the nation’s right-to-work states became so during the decade following V-J Day.

Why the revival now, when strikes and union cards have become rarities? In addition to what AFL-CIO Political Director Michael Podhorzer calls the “Republican anti-labor juggernaut” and unions’ diminishing popularity, there’s the growing influence of Koch-funded nonprofits like the National Right to Work Committee and the American Legislative Exchange Council, which creates and lobbies for model conservative bills. In Wisconsin, a scholar associated with ALEC published a study arguing that right to work would boost per-capita income growth, a finding contradicted by most otherresearch.

Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, who introduced the right-to-work bill last month, is a former ALEC state chairman and is on the record as having discussed right to work with other ALEC supporters after Walker’s election in 2010. He said ALEC had no influence on his decision to bring the bill. “Not ALEC, that’s the boogeyman that just is never true,” Fitzgerald said, saying that the business group Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce played a large role. “WMC’s support was critical to getting the bill through,” he said.

It was Walker, seen by many as a presidential contender for 2016, who started the current wave of state anti-union legislation with his controversial championing of 2011’s Act 10. That bill removed collective bargaining rights for most of Wisconsin’s public sector employees. “I would say this is an ongoing trend that goes back almost exactly four years,” says Paul Secunda, a law professor at Milwaukee’s Marquette University Law School and a labor movement sympathizer. Walker’s 2011 bill, Secunda notes, initiated similar efforts in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Tennessee, Nevada, Idaho and Florida.

By late last year the anti-labor movement Walker created had spun beyond his control. Walker was surprisingly reluctant, after his November reelection, to take up right to work, calling it a “ distraction.” It was only when political pressure to introduce the bill, stoked by Fitzgerald, became overwhelming that Walker promised to sign it.

A probable reason for Walker’s hesitation was that, despite his fervent anti-union rhetoric and actions, Walker still had some support within union households. Writing in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, reporter Craig Gilbert observed that while public-sector union households gave Walker a 73 percent disapproval rating in January, private-sector union households gave him a much more forgiving 53 percent, and an approval rating of 43 percent (compared to public-sector union households’ low approval rating of 26 percent). Right-to-work’s passage will surely diminish that support.

It will also further weaken the vestiges of organized labor’s once-dominant presence in Wisconsin, where union density, now 11 percent, averaged 20.9 percent as recently as 1989, according to the oldest comparable data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The percentage was almost certainly higher in the 1940s and 1950s, when union membership nationally neared, at times, 35 percent.

It’s unlikely that Wisconsin’s right-to-work law will have any significant effect either way on wages. When more Americans were union members, a massive contract between, say, Ford and the United Auto Workers, could lead to wage gains across the economy. But that equation has now been broken, labor experts say. Union collective-bargaining agreements no longer have much ripple effect.

Right to work is now “a big symbolic fight, unions gear up for these battles, and anti-union forces gear up for these battles,” said Jake Rosenfeld, a sociology professor at the University of Washington. “I think to a large degree, in the private sector, this is a war that’s already been won.”

The progress of the right-to-work movement, and a federal labor law regime that has done little to stem union decline, have led labor groups to experiment with new forms of organizing that don’t rely on exclusive representation or even, in some cases, collective bargaining.

The Fight For $15 movement, which brought the low wages of millions of service workers to national attention, is an offshoot of the Service Employees International Union, and the OUR Walmart campaign was created by the United Food and Commercial Workers. The latter may have influenced Walmart’s recent decision to raise its hourly minimum to $10, even as the company continues to resist union drives.

Democrats, meanwhile, have consolidated their message around a need to empower workers and raise wages in advance of the 2016 election. In January, the AFL-CIO held a summit in Washington to announce it would push a wages agenda in primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire. The Democratic populist Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts gave the keynote.

Walker is building his presidential bid on the foundation of his opposition to unions. At the Conservative Political Action Conference last week, he told a group of young Republicans that his fight against union protesters in 2011 had prepared him to take on the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant should he win the presidency. (Walker later said that he didn’t mean to draw an equivalence between union supporters and terrorists.) Two days later, Walker said that President Ronald Reagan’s firing of 11,000 air traffic controllers during their illegal 1981 strike was the most “significant foreign policy decision” of an administration better known for presiding over the Cold War’s end.

“I think he’s going for broke now, right?” said Wisconsin state Democratic Sen. Chris Larson, a member of the Senate labor committee. “He’s all in for trying to make his next career move. His future is not in Wisconsin … he’s off on the pageant, trying to find his next gig.”

Correction: A prior version of this article misattributed to ALEC the funding source of a study on right-to-work.